My First Ever Article

Back from when I was just a baby writer, in '22. I'd been commissioned by Quillette Magazine to write about OnlyFans, and they edited the piece almost out of recognition. So here are my actual words.

The ‘Social Cost’ of OnlyFans.

Warily, late last week, I opened the latest article to be written about OnlyFans, a platform which allows creators to monetise our social media posts behind a paywall. I began using it in its infancy, back in 2017, when no one outside the freelance modelling community was talking about it. But this year it became big enough to interest the mainstream media; hence my wariness. So far in 2020, I have waded through numerous attempts by various journalists to explain the phenomenon. I’ve seen journalists fixate anxiously over the large sums some creators are earning, voice concern that it might harm teenagers (though under 18’s are locked out of the site), and agonise over the possibility that some users might ask creators to do things they don’t want to do (not like any other job, then). But today in The New Statesman, Louise Perry had written an article; ‘How OnlyFans became the porn industry’s great lockdown winner – and at what cost’. I barely even recognised it as being about the site I use on a daily basis. I found myself compelled to at least try to set the record straight.

Because not only do I use OnlyFans (it accounts for 25%-30% of my monthly income), but many of my model friends and peers do. I’ve been a freelance model for 17 years; traditionally, models like me find our own work without using agents, by advertising ourselves on specialist networking sites used by models and photographers worldwide. Over the last few years, I’ve started producing my own video content and selling it via websites like Clips4Sale too, providing myself with a secondary passive income. And in 2017, when I became aware of OnlyFans, I started creating content for subscribers there, as well. It suits customers who prefer a ‘little-and-often’ approach, with short, daily updates, and I like to spread my risk by having multiple income streams.

In the opening paragraph of Ms Perry’s article, I was immediately alarmed to see her speak of the public’s appetite for ‘ever more extreme pornographic content’. At the beginning of an article all about OnlyFans, referencing extreme porn seemed especially jarring. OnlyFans is an absolutely hideous platform if you want to publish extreme content. Their list of banned words is extensive, their list of banned activities similarly well-populated. OnlyFans has already positioned itself at the very shallowest end of the pornographic pool. If you wanted to protect the public from ‘extreme’ content, you’d do better to look at Pornhub and similar tube sites which operate with no paywall, and have a far more relaxed approach to edgy porn.

OnlyFans is succeeding not through being extreme, but through innovation. Though traditionally porn has perhaps allowed us to see performers as not much more than sexual objects, in contrast my OnlyFans page (and those of my peers) contains a plethora of content that shows us to be more complicated than that. I think that’s healthy for consumers - they can’t easily reduce us down to a collection of sexual signifiers if they’re watching videos of us decorating our houses for Christmas, talking about our weekend plans, and sometimes ranting (in my case) about sexism. I’m not claiming that OnlyFans isn’t porn. But I think it’s good porn, in that it encourages our customers to see us as real people. I want my customers to know that I’m happily married, and I want them to feel like welcome visitors in my house. I’m happy if my work gives them orgasms, but I aim to provide them with company and entertainment too. ‘Come for the porn, stay for the community’, sums up what I try to achieve, and it’s a popular strategy.

I wonder if it’s a fear of men’s arousal itself that lies at the heart of anti-porn feminists’ worries about pornography? I’d love to reassure them; my membership is made up mostly of men, and certainly, they’re men who find me attractive on some level. But this doesn’t mean they automatically go into stalker/predator mode when they interact with me. On the contrary, they are remarkably understanding about the fact that they’re not my only priority. Perhaps because, due to the behind-the-scenes nature of my content, they know I’m not lying alone on a king-sized bed somewhere, permanently horny and waiting for their DMs. If you’re in porn and you want to be treated like a person with feelings and fragilities, and a real life that isn’t always sexy, platforms like OnlyFans can serve you well. And it’s a product that seems to especially appeal to people who want to consume their erotica in an ethical fashion. As Frank, one of my members, says, ‘I’m a real fan of OnlyFans, because that way I discover the person behind the pictures’. Tom, another longstanding member, adds, ‘I’m safe in the knowledge that I’m consuming content ethically, because I know the creators are in control of what they're shooting’. I like breaking down the barriers between consumer and creator. If some of them are young and impressionable, or perhaps have never had a girlfriend of their own, I hope that their relationship with me, however limited, will maybe teach them a little about what they’d value in a partner. That talking and laughing is as important as physical attraction.

I can understand why feminists used to often be so critical of porn. Pre-internet, the (mostly male) porn producers seem to have been the ones who called the shots, enjoyed the longterm careers, and had time to generate real wealth, whereas women were perhaps more likely to be treated as though disposable. But I’m disappointed that many anti-porn feminists seem unwilling to update their opinions, in the face of so much evidence that the industry’s changing dramatically. OnlyFans is only one example; even before OF launched, my peers and I had been shooting our own content and selling it on platforms which had made this easy to do. Many consumers are happy to buy fairly simply-produced work if it matches their interests, so I’ve been able to self-shoot a huge body of saleable video content, entirely on my own and with myself as the only performer. I’ve seen a clear see-sawing of economic power; when I began modelling in 2003, it tended to be the photographers who had the fancy cars, the big houses. Models, being younger, and often enjoying much shorter careers, didn’t necessarily accrue much wealth before the industry spat them out again. These days, the number of female model/producers in my acquaintance who’re earning £100K+ each year is climbing fast. We stay in the business longer, and the rewards tend to grow with time and exposure. And thanks to platforms like OnlyFans, if we want to shoot everything from home, alone, we can. With steeply increasing profits, an increased level of power over who we work with, and no necessity to ever drag ourselves to cattle market castings, or photoshoots we don’t want to do, we have never been more empowered. So the convulsion from authoritarian feminists over OnlyFans has left me baffled. Not least because the business model is so flexible, which allows women in all sorts of (sometimes difficult) circumstances to make money on our terms.

Ms Perry notes that the median membership for an OnlyFans creator is only 30, without addressing the fact that for the vast majority of creators, it’s by no means a full time job. Until Covid-19 and lockdown, I was only uploading one short video a day. The entire update took me less than 5 minutes to produce, and with my 60-ish members, it was still making enough to cover my monthly mortgage payments. So, while the creators who only have 30 members may not be able to dream of going full time, making a six figure salary, or buying a house with their earnings, their part time OF job may well pay a good proportion of their rent, maybe supplement a low paid full time job, or give them an extra fund for holidays. OnlyFans may be ‘more unequal than South Africa’ as Perry states, but it is not capriciously keeping some creators on low wages while disproportionately rewarding its favourites. It simply provides a platform, and we make what we can of it. ‘The same amount of effort (from creators) goes in’ claims Perry, ‘but a very different level of reward comes out’. And that would be dreadful, if we were talking about, say, employees of British Gas. But we’re not talking about employees at all, we’re talking about the pornographic equivalent of YouTubers.

As a YouTuber as well as an OF creator, I find both to be fairly meritocratic. Lots of creators start with no established name or fan-base, but if they choose subject matter that proves popular, and if they deliver it well and often, they might become the next YouTube millionaire. If, like me, they choose a niche subject and only upload occasionally, they’ll make almost no money at all.

OnlyFans is no different. Frequent updates will get you a more loyal fanbase. Regular interaction with members tends to pay off. Shooting more ambitious content will allow you to charge a premium. The rewards aren’t equal for all. But neither is the effort, any more than one could say that all YouTubers are equally hard-working, and should be equally remunerated. Perry compares the creators who earn enough to buy houses from their OF earnings to ‘casino millionaires’. It’s a hurtful though familiar comparison, because the creators who got themselves to the top of the OF earning hierarchy didn’t gamble. They worked for every cent, often beginning as complete unknowns while juggling another career. Savannah Solo is an excellent example of this - in the top 0.3% of earners having not done a day’s modelling work in her life before setting up her OF account in January 2020, and having kept her day job because she loves it. She didn’t win a lottery; she merely entertained so many people, so well, that she’s reaping the rewards, which include a house.

‘Why do people desire this?” laments Perry, in conclusion. The answer is the same as the reason people turn on daytime TV when they’re alone. It’s the reason why so many of us have favourite YouTubers who we feel we know, and subscribe to artists’ Patreon pages. Humans are interested in humans. Is it so alarming that we’re sometimes also interested in semi-naked humans, behaving in ways we find arousing? As my longterm member, Bruce, says; ‘I love you for your fun’. And detractors, I think, fail to understand that the interaction is valuable both ways. I like earning my monthly £4K from OnlyFans. But, during lockdown, my members have been valuable company for me, too. Last night I watched a horror film (remotely) with one of them; no one was being paid - we’ve just become friends through social media. The fact that the platform we met on was OnlyFans rather than Facebook feels largely irrelevant at this point.

‘And, in the end, cui bono’? Perry asks. ‘Who benefits?’. We all do. Tom, the friend who watched last night’s horror film with me, perhaps expresses it best. ‘For the most part we’re just normal people, like the creators themselves, who enjoy normal human interaction.’ OF has allowed me to humanise my pornographic output in a way that lets me be as real as I dare, and makes it impossible for my customers not to recognise that I’m a whole person. I believe that pornography, long term, will benefit from this approach. And in the meantime, OF users and creators alike enjoy a little extra daily interaction. That’s never felt more valuable.

2025 Ariel here! Sadly, I no longer hold such an optimistic view of OnlyFans. Because of the money that can be made on the platform, added to poor handling IMO from the owners, a lot of the highest earning pages are now run by agencies and/or assistants paid by the actual creators to interact with fans. This feels next-door to catfishing, to me, and I became uncomfortable with it as a platform in 2024, when they also became increasingly censorious about fetish-related content. I’ve continued to run a fan site on a smaller, currently more permissive platform (LoyalFans) but OnlyFans doesn’t feel a comfortable fit for me any more. I feel nostaligic for the early days of OF, when everyone seemed to be having such fun, and we were all trying to distract ourselves from Covid.